left eye on gub'ment

Mittens and the President spent debates one and two trying to out chest thump each other about China. There’s more to come in the final debate, where fifteen minutes have been set aside for “the rise of China and tomorrow’s world.” On one level, the men are debating economic policy. On another level, they’re positing China as a threat, to show they are the one better able to protect the country from the new yellow peril.

With so much airtime given over to China – Evan Osnos at the New Yorkercalled it “the strangely starring role that China has come to play in this campaign” – Time Magazine decided it was a good week to put China on its cover. The focus of Hannah Beech’s cover story is the Community Party’s leadership transition rather than the economic policies that have incited so much finger pointing and whining from Mitt and the President. Still, Time manages to ride the China-as-threat leitmotif with an all red cover headlined, “The New Leader of the Unfree World.”

The article itself is titled Big Brotherhood, with a long sidebar on “An Orwellian State.” The lead paragraph describes a recent official celebration that took place in a Tiananmen Square that “bristled with the paraphernalia of a paranoid security state.” Rather than political reform, Breech writes, the Communist Party has been building a “massive internal-security apparatus” that has made China “the biggest security state in the world.”

Being critical of an enemy wins votes and sells magazines. But it can also, sometimes, lead to an uncomfortable self-awareness. This was the case after World War II, when Americans were confronted with the hypocrisy of Black soldiers who had fought for freedom and democracy in Europe returning home to Jim Crow. Continue reading →

No time for a proper post this week, but wanted to share a few thoughts about race and technology. This question, especially: what is the color of data?

In one sense, data has no color. Or maybe it’s the luminescent green of binary code 1’s and 0’s.

In another sense, data is white. As in the white folks who are working the jobs in data, big or otherwise. So maybe Asian too.

What I’m really after, though, is a visual of whose information is being shared in this era of information sharing. I’m interested in personal data – PII (personally identifiable information) – that, in the maw of the government, has personal consequences: arrest, harassment, deportation. This data, I suspect, is Black and Brown.

We can start with the basics, the decade-long effort to connect up the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) and DHS’s Automated Biometric Identification (IDENT). These two databases contains, from IAFIS, the criminal records of 70 million people + noncriminal info on 34 million people + info on 73,000 known and suspected terrorists, and from IDENT, information on 55 million people. The racial disparities in the criminal justice system are cumulative, and so are most intense at the back end of the system (length of prison system). But even at the front end – where fingerprints are taken – the disparity is intense, particularly when policies like NYPD’s stop & frisk are in effect.

We can look as well at the information being sucked up and kicked around by HSIN, the Homeland Security Information Network. In its latest iteration, HSIN 3.0 now contains information about “members of the public who are the subject of documents, reports, or bulletins contained in the HSIN collaboration spaces.” Those collaboration spaces range far and wide, but the upshot is that these are largely reports on people whose “observed behavior may be indicative of intelligence gathering or pre-operational planning, related to terrorism, criminal, or other illicit intention.” The “see something say something” campaign has included some desultory efforts to encourage people to not find someone suspicious because of his race, but to report only suspicious behaviors.

We can look at intelligence information that’s being shared in the DHS Intelligence Enterprise (DHS IE), made up of the DHS Office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) + the intelligence elements of: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), and U.S. Secret Service (USSS).

There’s no question these data sets are disproportionately African American, Latino, South Asian, and Muslim. But how disproportionate? And why? And is that OK? That’s what I’d like some data on.

In D.C., the U.S. Supreme Court is back in session, with oral arguments for Moncrieffe v. Holder set for this Wednesday. Question before the court: is possession of two joints worth of marijuana an “aggravated felony” that subjects Adrian Moncrieffe – who came to the U.S. legally at the age of three – to mandatory deportation? Best summary of the case by Kevin Johnson at ImmigrationProf Blog.

Not yet a genius, but working up to it, filmmaker Eugene Jarecki’s documentary on the war on drugs opens in limited release in New York City. Lovingly and very well produced segment on The House I Live In aired yesterday on NPR’s Bob Edwards show.

In the criminal justice system, the judge is not the head of the heap. Don’t be fooled by the black robe – the honorable so and so sitting on up high flexing his gavel is not the most powerful person in the system. The king of the hill is not the police chief or the cop on the beat or anyone in between. It’s not the prison warden. Not the sheriff. The top of the list is not even the legislature, maker of the laws.

The top dog? The prosecutor.

A prosecutor’s everyday decisions – about what to charge and how to prosecute – have a bigger impact than those of any other criminal justice official. Law professor and former public defender Angela J. Davis calls prosecutors “the most powerful officials in the criminal justice system.”

A big chunk of that power comes from keeping their decisions hidden from view. It’s no wonder prosecutors like to call the shots from behind the bushes, Dick Cheney style:

Even when they are doing the right thing, they prefer to do so quietly. When Bronx District Attorney Robert T. Johnson’s office decided in July to stop prosecuting people wrongfully arrested for trespass in public housing projects, there was no press conference. After years of prosecuting trespass charges, Johnson’s office realized that the police were stopping and questioning people walking through public housing properties without reasonable suspicion that the person had committed any crime. This is a common enough practice among NYPD officers conditioned by the department’s stop and frisk policies. It is also a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Continue reading →

Beyond voting restrictions, housing, employment, and so on restrictions imposed on people withe criminal records vary from state to state. The ABA adn NIJ has put together a slickly designed National Inventory of the Collateral Consequences of Conviction. Still a long way from being complete, but looks like it will be thorough when it is.

You’ve seen the Newsweek cover, and laughed at the mocking twitter and gawker responses. But admit it. You’ve not actually read the article.

In lieu of reporting – the kind done by actual journalists – Newsweek opted for a personal essay to explicate the photo on last week’s Muslim Rage cover. Ayaan Hirsi Ali took the job. It was a rush job, and it showed.

Hirsi Ali’s is a short piece, starting with this premise:

The Muslim men and women (and yes, there are plenty of women) who support—whether actively or passively—the idea that blasphemers deserve to suffer punishment are not a fringe group. On the contrary, they represent the mainstream of contemporary Islam….In the age of globalization and mass immigration, such intolerance has crossed borders and become the defining characteristic of Islam.

And here is her sneering criticism of “the Western response”:

And the defining characteristic of the Western response? As Rushdie’s memoir makes clear, it is the utterly incoherent tendency to simultaneously defend free speech—and to condemn its results.

Hirsi Ali then spends most of the remaining space writing about her own experiences, and Salmon Rushdie’s life under fatwa. As a Somali born Dutch politician and writer, Hirsi Ali has lived under a death threat since 2004 for writing Submission, a short 2004 film that dramatized misogynistic interpretations of the Koran. The director Theo van Gogh was publicly murdered in a knife attack, the assailant using the knife to affix a note to his body calling for the death of Hirsi Ali.

Let’s put aside for a moment any snarkiness about Hirsi Ali that might arise from the fact that she is now a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a darling of the hard right. Whatever her current political affiliation (the Economist has taken note of Ali’s “talent for reinvention”), a note calling for your death knifed into the body of your colleague is scary as f*ck.

Knowing this about Hirsi Ali gives some much needed context, if not to Newsweek’s ridiculous “Muslim Rage” headline, at least to its subheading: “How I survived it. How we can end it.”

How to end it

So Hirsi Ali has something to say about the first person How-I-survived-it bit. What about the How-we-can-end-it part? Here, she runs into some trouble. A few years ago, in an interview in Reason magazine, Hirsi Ali’s solution was…total war. The interviewer asked whether Islam can bring about positive social changes. Hirsi Ali answered “Only if Islam is defeated.” The interviewer, trying to give her a way out, gently nudged her: “Don’t you mean radical Islam?” Hirsi Ali’s response is astounding in its candor. In her own words:

If you didn’t have time to read the Office of Inspector General’s 500+ page report on Fast and Furious, here’s the summary: Attorney General Eric Holder told the truth, and did not personally know about the screw-ups until they were reported by the media. At fault were officials at ATF headquarters and the Phoenix field division. And number six of the OIG’s six otherwise bland recommendations (review policies, create guidelines, etc.) was this: require high-level officials responsible for authorizing wiretap applications to actually read the applications they’re submitting. Ya think?

The White House released its annual list of countries to put on its drug policy blacklist. In a memo to Secretary of State Clinton, Obama huffs: “I hereby identify the following countries as major drug transit or major illicit drug producing countries: Afghanistan, The Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Burma, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Laos, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela.” Oh goodness, he forgot the United States. Bolivian President Evo Morales said as much, as StoptheDrugWar.org reports in Bolivia, Venezuela Reject US Drug Criticism. A few days before Obama issued his memo, the Caravan for Peace had ended their 25 city journey in Washington DC, where over 100 Survivors of Mexico’s Drug Violence Tell US Government ‘We Need a New Approach.’

A month before 9/11, William Bratton took to the New York Times to bemoan the Cloudy Future for Policing. The LAPD (and before that, the NYPD) Chief of Police was, at that moment, the champion of community policing, combining CompStat’s ability to track crime statistics with broken windows theory to justify large numbers of arrests for “quality of life” and petty drug offenses. The intent was to let communities know the police were invested in them.

Yet, wrote Bratton, “many of the nation’s police forces face intense scrutiny and criticism for corruption, racial profiling, racial insensitivity, brutality, unresponsiveness to community concerns and professional incompetence.” Bratton warned that this kind of negative talk made it hard to recruit good officers. Nevermind the corruption, racially profiling, brutality, or incompetence.

Then 9/11 happened, and the public relationships problems disappeared.

Though no one knew it at the time, 9/11 also signaled the beginning of the end of the era of community policing. A consensus formed that the attack could have been prevented, and the failure to do so had been a failure of intelligence. The solution was more information – get more and share more.

Even though recommendations for change post-9/11 were directed primarily at the intelligence community, operationalizing the solution required the participation of local police departments: the FBI has only 14,000 special agents, compared to the 700,000 sworn officers working for city, state, and other police agencies around the country. (The CIA insists on keeping mum about its total number of agents.) In the interest of national security, policing entered a new era. Continue reading →

If you get clear the checkpoint but get arrested, don’t count on Twitter to be on your side when the gub’ment goes looking for any incriminating tweets. Twitter lost its white hat status last week when it gave up its fight against a subpoena: Twitter Gives Occupy Protester’s Tweets to U.S. Judge.

Two years ago, a group of planners devoted to “promoting walkable, mixed-use neighborhood development, sustainable communities and healthier living conditions” held their annual meeting in downtown Atlanta. This is a bit like a group of foodies discussing El Bulli while sharing a triple Whopper with cheese value meal.

The New Urbanists were quick with their jeers. James Howard Kuntsler was still speeding away in his taxi when he posted this photo essay The Horror of Downtown Atlanta. The author of The Geography of Nowhere knows a scary landscape when he sees one.

Of the (many) targets available to the (many) critics of downtown Atlanta, the favorite is the network of skywalks, which connect a total of 18 free-standing buildings across ten blocks: hi-rise luxury hotels, skyscrapers, a mall, and the massive AmericasMart complex.